Photos continues changing interface every few months, every time without any clear reason or logic. The underlying product is solid, but photos(and other Google products) definitely feel like they have some very expensive designers who continuously have to justify their own existence by changing the interface over and over and over again, without any reason to keep changing it other than securing their own jobs.
The lock-in with Photos they've slowly moved in is phenomenal. The exporting of originals is always somehow difficult due to random bugs. Lately I've had to resort to Takeout with some relatives to migrate them to Dropbox where they're not locked in, and about 20% of the photos don't contain any exported metadata. It's ridiculous since Google Photos shows those same pictures clearly on the timeline, indicating it does know when they were take, it just excludes that information from the Takeout.
For me it seems more or less (mostly less?) than iPhoto though I'm not really an iPhoto user.
What I find frustrating is I'd like to name people (as in face recognition) but the UI for doing so is horrible. Instead of being optimized to let me tag 50 to 100 people it's design to do one person at a time in a tedious way where you pick one face from the list of faces which takes to another screen where you edit the name, then going to back to the list you've lost your place.
Further, there is no way to sort or set a priority on people so for example 8 of the top 20 people it shows are people I haven't interacted with in 10 to 15 years. I'd much rather it show people who are part of my life. Further, one of those 8 is an x. I have no ill will toward them but I don't really want them at the top of the list. And, there's no rhyme or reason who's on that top list. it's not a list by number of photos or most recent or anything that I can figure out.
Why is this important? Because if I can tag my photos I can search for photos of people. But since they make it hard to use it's like they don't want it to be used.
not OP, but for me the killer feature of photos is having a phone gallery that syncs with the cloud and is easy to browse in my phone and my pc. My phone breaking or being lost is way less of a worry now since I don't have to worry about backups, and I can take a picture and have it available in my pc instantly.
iPhoto is mostly the same but it's too tied to the os, which is a problem if I want to move to android for a while or need a photo in my work laptop that isn't tied to my apple account.
